Chapter 1

Siena Melbourne had always believed heartbreak would feel like a clean break—like glass shattering, sharp but final. Instead, it festered. It dug into her ribs and curled cold fingers around her lungs, stealing air she didn’t realize she was holding until it hurt to breathe.

The night it happened was quiet. Too quiet. Her parents were out at yet another charity dinner, their laughter and designer perfume lingering faintly in the marble halls long after the doors had shut. Siena sat curled on the chaise in her bedroom, phone screen glowing in her trembling hands.

A photo. One she hadn’t meant to find.

Her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend now, though the word burned her tongue—leaning against his car, his arm slung casually around another girl. Their lips pressed together. The girl’s hand teasing the waistband of his jeans, careless and brazen.

The worst part wasn’t the betrayal. It was how unbothered he looked. Like Siena had never mattered.

Her chest squeezed until she couldn’t stop the tears. Not pretty, cinematic tears like in the movies, but hot, messy sobs that left her throat raw and her cheeks sticky. She buried her face in her knees, her body rocking as though motion might somehow contain the ache tearing her open.

She wanted to scream. Wanted to call him, demand an explanation, but pride held her frozen. Pride and something deeper: the realization that she’d been naive, fragile, and replaceable.

Outside her window, Velmore stretched in glittering silence. The city lights sparkled like promises she couldn’t touch, like freedom she wasn’t brave enough to claim. At seventeen—almost eighteen—Siena felt trapped in the gilded cage of her family’s expectations. Her father’s empire weighed on her shoulders, invisible but suffocating. Her mother’s sharp smiles, her endless talk of appearances and alliances, left Siena wondering if she even had a self beyond the Melbourne name.

And now this. The boy she’d thought might understand her—gone.

She didn’t know it, but she wasn’t alone that night.

Miles away, in a room lined with screens, Damien Voss leaned forward, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his eyes fixed on her image. Every angle of her bedroom was displayed in chilling clarity—cameras her family had long forgotten existed, hidden in the corners of the sprawling estate.

He watched her collapse inward, her face blotched from crying, her small hands trembling around her phone.

And he smiled.

Not with warmth, not with comfort. But with hunger.

Siena Melbourne had always been fragile porcelain, too sheltered for the world she lived in. Damien had been watching her for years, tracking her routines, studying her loneliness. Tonight, though, something shifted. The sight of her breaking, stripped raw of her defenses, made something coil hot and dangerous in his chest.

She was ripe for taking.

“Perfect,” he murmured to himself, his fingers brushing the edge of the screen as if he could touch her through it.

He imagined the weight of her in his arms, the sound of her voice begging, trembling. She wouldn’t understand it at first, wouldn’t see the inevitability. But he would teach her. Break her. Remake her.

His gaze lingered on the delicate curve of her throat, where soon his mark would rest.

While Siena wept in her bedroom, another man was digging into secrets that should have stayed buried.

Alec Ward sat hunched over his laptop in a cramped flat, the glow of the screen painting sharp lines across his face. He had been chasing whispers—contracts, shell companies, unexplained transfers—all circling back to something he couldn’t name. Tonight, his luck had shifted.

A file. Encrypted, buried deep beneath layers meant to keep out even the most skilled. He cracked it open.

Project Eden.

The words pulsed across his screen. He scrolled faster, eyes narrowing as images loaded—blueprints of underground chambers, lists of names coded in alphanumeric sequences, dossiers stamped with a sigil he didn’t recognize. At the bottom of one page, highlighted in red, two words made his stomach clench.

Lilith-X.

He didn’t know why, but the name scraped something primal inside him, like a memory just out of reach. He leaned closer, scrolling line after line, until suddenly his screen flickered. Then went black.

A warning.

Alec cursed, slamming the laptop shut. Whoever owned these files had noticed his intrusion. He had no idea that his discovery—and his bloodline—were tied to the girl sobbing in her bedroom across the city.

Back at the Melbourne estate, Siena wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. Her reflection in the mirror made her flinch. Swollen eyes. Red nose. Weak.

“I hate him,” she whispered to herself, but her voice cracked.

Her phone buzzed. A notification. She frowned, swiping it open. A delivery alert.

Package at the gate.

Confused, Siena padded down the hall, her bare feet whispering against the cold marble. The house was cavernous in its silence. She slipped outside, hugging her cardigan tight around her shoulders. The night air was sharp, tinged with sea salt from the cliffs beyond.

A small box sat neatly on the stone step. No return address.

Siena glanced around—no one. Just the rustle of the hedges, the distant crash of waves against rock.

Her hands shook as she lifted the lid.

Inside lay a velvet-lined case. Resting against the plush fabric was a choker—black satin, simple but elegant. In its center, a pendant glinted, dark metal shaped into a coiled serpent.

She should have felt fear. But instead, her breath caught with something else. A strange pull. The serpent seemed alive under the moonlight, whispering to her skin before she even touched it.

Her phone buzzed again.

Happy Birthday.

The text came from an unknown number.

Siena’s chest tightened. Tomorrow, she would be eighteen. Legal.

Before she could react, the world shifted.

A hand—gloved, brutal—clamped over her mouth. Another snatched her wrist, wrenching it behind her back. She dropped the box, the choker clattering against stone.

Her scream was swallowed into the night.

The attacker dragged her toward the shadows, the sharp tang of chloroform filling her lungs. She kicked, clawed, fought, but her strength was nothing against the grip pinning her down.

Her last sight before the darkness swallowed her was the choker lying on the ground, the serpent gleaming as though it smiled.

And then—nothing.

Her phone lit up on the step, buzzing again.

You’re mine now.